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The agency's workaday labors, the tedious accumulation and evaluation of infinite quantities of minutiae, have more in common with IBM's 360 than with Ian Fleming's 007. The task demands high intelligence as well as patience. A State Department veteran once said: "You'll find more liberal intellectuals per square inch at CIA than anywhere else in the Government." Indeed, the agency is staffed from top to bottom with some of the nation's best qualified experts; 30% have Ph.Ds. They are linguists, economists, cartographers, psychiatrists, agronomists, chemists, even anthropologists and foresters. CIA experts, it is said, could completely staff a middle-sized college.
The "Get." A scant fraction of the agency's 15,000-odd employees actually go out into the cold. At Langley's elaborate seventh-floor operations center, a bank of high-speed (100 words per minute) printers receive top-secret traffic from the National Security Agency, diplomatic reports from embassies overseas, information from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, as well as data from CIA men around the world. In Helms's office, there are "secure" red, grey, blue or white direct-line phones with scramblers attached—on which the President often calls.
The operations room is hooked into the White House Situation Room, the Pentagon's military command post, and the State Department through a near-miraculous phalanx of teletype machines. One data page per minute can be fed in, encoded, flashed to one of the centers, then decoded the instant it arrives. Down the hall from the operations center is a room papered with huge maps. On one set, the war in Viet Nam is plotted with up-to-the-hour reports of combat action and other trouble spots. Another chart may track the course of a Soviet ship bound from Odessa to Cuba—along with U.S. surveillance forces in the area.
One major purpose of all the influx and indexing is the daily compilation of a slim white 8-in. by 10½-in. document that is delivered to the White House in a black CIA car every evening between 6 and 7 o'clock. It bears CIA's emblem stamped in blue, is entitled "The President's Daily Brief," usually runs between three and six pages of single-spaced type, and covers the key intelligence "get" of the day. At times, it may have included such fascinating data as the results of a urinalysis pinched from a Vienna hospital while a major world leader was a patient, or the latest bedroom exploits of Indonesia's Sukarno or U-2 photographs taken over China.
Big Boot. The agency's overseas operations are diversified almost beyond belief. CIA men may control an entire airline (such as Air America, which runs cargo and operatives in Laos, Thailand and Viet Nam), a full-scale broadcasting operation (such as Radio Free Europe). They may pose as missionaries, businessmen, travel agents, brokers or bartenders. They may be seeking infinitely minute pieces of information by paying a paltry $50 to a Hungarian going home for a visit so that he will take a short drive out of his way to check on the number of Russian troops in Szekes-fehervar. Or they may be arranging a revolution—as they did when Premier Mossadegh was deposed in 1953, or when Colonel Jacobo Arbenz was over thrown in Guatemala in 1954.